Tag: stock market

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin on Wednesday said he won’t vote for the current tax plan, potentially jeapardizing the Republican effort to score its first signature legislative triumph in the Trump presidency. Johnson, a businessman before he became senator, contends the current plan helps big corporations more than smaller companies. “If they can pass it without me, let them,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, a sister publication of MarketWatch. “I’m not going to vote for this tax package.” Republicans only control 52 seats in the Senate and can’t afford to lose more than a few votes. Johnson also briefly opposed a Senate bill to replace Obamacare, but he eventually sided with the rest of his conservative colleagues. He’s generally been a strong supporter of lower taxes and deregulation.

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Oil prices fell Wednesday to settle at their lowest level in nearly two weeks. The Energy Information Administration reported that U.S. crude supplies rose unexpectedly, for a second week in a row. Total U.S. crude production, meanwhile, rose to nearly 9.65 million barrels a day for the week ended Nov. 10. That was the largest average weekly output on record at the EIA, based on data going back to 1983. December West Texas Intermediate crude fell 37 cents, or 0.7%, to settle at $55.33 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

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Three freshman members of the UCLA basketball team, LiAngelo Ball, Jalen Hill and Cody Riley, have been suspended indefinitely, according to Bleacher Report and other outlets, after having had criminal charges reportedly dropped in connection with a recent alleged shoplifting incident at a Louis Vuitton store in Hangzhou, China. The players expressed remorse and apologized to the university and its storied basketball program as well as their families while making their first public statements Wednesday on the matter. President Trump, who wondered on Twitter this morning whether he would be thanked for his role in their release from detention after a week and who’d called his discussion of the issue with Chinese leader Xi Jinping a “great” one, was thanked by all three players at a televised news conference in Los Angeles.

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Gold prices settled lower Wednesday, easing back in the wake of two sessions of gains, as key U.S. dollar benchmark traded nearly flat for the session. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index was nearly unchanged at 93.794, trading off session lows which had helped boost dollar-denominated prices of gold earlier Wednesday. December gold lost $5.20, or 0.4%, to settle at $1,277.70 an ounce.

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Shares of Boot Barn Holdings Inc. shot up 6.4% toward a 10-month high in afternoon trade Wednesday, after J.P. Morgan upgraded the western and work-related footwear and apparel retailer. The stock has now run up 48% since Boot Barn reported fiscal second-quarter profit, revenue and same-store sales that beat expectations after the Nov. 2 close. J.P. Morgan analyst Matthew Boss raised his rating to overweight, after being at neutral since April 2016, and nearly doubled his stock price target to $17 from $9. After hosting a meeting with Boot Barn management, Boss came away more confident that sales have stabilized and that e-commerce has swung to a tailwind from a headwind the past three quarters, while the balance sheet has strengthened. Boss said that suggests company has “weathered the storm” of earnings compression it has suffered the past two years. He also stable-to-rising oil and gas prices suggests the economic backdrop in the key oil-and-gas states that Boot Barn operates in are improving. Despite the rally this month, the stock was still down 0.6% year to date, while the SPDR S&P Retail ETF has lost 9.1% and the S&P 500 has climbed 15%.

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General Electric Co.’s stock bounced sharply off earlier lows to rally 1.5% on heavy volume, enough to pace the gainers within the Dow Jones Industrial Average . The stock was down as much as 2.2% at its intraday low of $17.50 in the first minute after the open, and was up as much as 2.7% at its high of $18.38, which was reached a little after 11:00 a.m. ET. Volume of 86 million shares made the stock the day’s most actively traded. The stock was on track for just the fourth gain in the 18 sessions since the day after GE reported third-quarter results. The bounce comes after the 12.6% plunge in the past two sessions to six-year low, as investors and analysts expressed disappointment over new Chief Executive John Flannery’s turnaround plan. Despite Wednesday’s rally, GE’s stock was still by far the worst performer among Dow components over the past three months, shedding 27.8% over that time. The next worst were shares of Merck & Co. , which have lost 12.1%. Meanwhile, the Dow has gained 6.0% the past three months.

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Richard Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will leave his post by the end of the month, he said in a memo to staff. There has been growing speculation he will run for governor of Ohio, though the memo does not refer to future plans. His departure would allow President Donald Trump to appoint a new director. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican, said “we are long overdue for new leadership” at the agency, which was created by the Dodd-Frank Act.

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SendGrid Inc.’s newly minted stock opened Wednesday at $18.55 at 10:31 a.m. ET, or 15.9% above the $16 initial public offering price. The IPO had priced late Tuesday above the expected range of $13.50 to $15.50, with the company increasing the number of shares offered to 8.2 million from 7.7 million, a sign of strong demand. SendGrid, sells a software platform that helps companies manage email communications with customers, raised $131.2 million with its IPO. The stock was last up 16.6% at $18.68. The company went public at a time when the Renaissance IPO ETF has rallied 6.5% over the past three months and the S&P 500 has gained 4.2%.

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Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration Wednesday showed that domestic crude supplies rose by 1.9 million barrels for the week ended Nov. 10. That was contrary to the forecast for a decline of 1 million barrels from analysts surveyed by S&P Global Platts. The American Petroleum Institute on Tuesday had reported a 6.5 million-barrel climb, according to sources. Gasoline stockpiles also rose by 900,000 barrels for the week, while distillate stockpiles fell 800,000 barrels, according to the EIA. The S&P Global Platts survey forecast supply declines of 1 million barrels for gasoline and 2 million barrels for distillates. December crude was down 69 cents, or 1.2%, from Tuesday to $55.01 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It traded at $55.13 before the supply data.

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Shares of Apple Inc. slid 1.1% in morning trade, putting them on track to suffer a fifth-straight loss since they closed at a record on Nov. 8. That would be the longest losing streak since the five-session stretch ending April 11. During the current streak, the stock has shed 3.9%, compared with the 2.2% decline during the April losing streak. Apple’s current streak started after it closed at a record of $176.24 a week ago, when the technology behemoth became the first public company to clear the$900 billion market-capitalization hurdle with a closing market cap of $904.9 billion. The current market cap is $869.9 billion. The stock has run up 46% year to date, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 has climbed 29% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gained 18%.

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